Just in the last week, we’ve seen two major incidents of “faked” hate crimes make their way into the national media. First, police confirmed that the woman who claimed to have been attacked and to have had her hijab torn off and wallet stolen by white men wearing Trump hats invented the whole account. Second, a Jewish and “white Hispanic” student duo were confirmed to have been behind the spray-painting of racist and homophobic slurs along with the word “Trump” inside their campus chapel.

The mainstream response to incidents like these is to think, at first: “Oh no! Someone spray-painted swastikas on a church? This is a hate crime!” But then, once the culprits are proven to be leftist kids trying to pin the blame for their actions on neo-Nazi Trump supporters rather than actual neo-Nazi Trump supporters, that becomes: “Oh, it’s a good thing we figured that out. So there wasn’t any hate crime here after all! Just an act of vandalism. Time to punish the vandals for committing vandalism, then.”

But the fact is that, even though our multi-culture isn’t ready or willing to admit it, these “fake” hate crimes are still real hate crimes.

As a society, we have a classification for something called “hate crimes”—and we consider a “hate crime” to be worse than the regular instance of that same crime—because it represents an emotional disposition towards individuals who were not present within the crime itself—an emotional disposition which, if allowed to express itself freely without penalty, would inspire others to commit similar acts against those other individuals. We don’t consider it a “hate crime” for a white person to assault a person who happens to be black over (say) a traffic dispute, and we don’t necessarily think that this crime was worse just because its victim happened to have been black. But if a white person assaults a black person simply because he is black, then the fear that this will inspire similar acts of violence leads us to add extra deterrence against that possibility.

Whether one is a minority or not has no bearing whatsoever on the validity of this underlying logic. In fact, while it is true that a majority group actually faces a smaller number of possible assailants from outside, it also represents an even greater number of possible. The average white person in the United States encounters fewer black people per day than the number of white people encountered by the average black person. As a result, there are actually more opportunities for whites to fall victims to hate crimes.

Yet, when the victim of an act of hatred is a Republican white male, this reasoning immediately goes straight out the window. (It should be noted that people who meet all of these criteria represent somewhere loosely within the range of 15 to 25% of the U.S. population; whites are about 63% of the U.S. population, approximately half of them identify as conservative, and approximately half of those are male.)

“Fake” hate crimes are real hate crimes against whites. They are literally meant to inspire hatred against a whole group of people.

They do so by crafting the deceptive impression that whites themselves are hateful enough to have committed fake hate crime. But the fact that a hate crimes is faked doesn’t make it a “fake” hate crime. It is still a real hate crime. “Faking” an act of hatred is merely the means by which this particular subset of hate crime is designed to inspire hatred against a whole group of people.